Peta Credlin: More heads must roll after hotel quarantine inquiry final report
Emails have revealed a request for ADF troops to help with our botched hotel quarantine was abruptly cancelled 12 hours later, for reasons no gutless official in the Daniel Andrews government will admit, and it’s time they stopped the charade, writes Peta Credlin.
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The hotel quarantine calamity claimed another scalp in Victoria this week, the head of the department of health, but that can’t be the end of it. If it is, it would be the first public policy disaster which is only the fault of public servants and that elected politicians had nothing to do with.
Back in late June, when Victoria’s virus death toll stood at just 20, Victoria’s Emergency Management Commissioner Andrew Crisp asked Canberra to urgently provide 850 ADF personnel to replace incompetent private security guards in running hotel quarantine.
Within one hour of Crisp’s request, the PM approved the troops and they were on their way but then abruptly cancelled 12 hours later for reasons no gutless politician or official in the Daniel Andrews government will admit. Eight hundred dead Victorians later, you can understand why families wonder if their loved one might still be here for Christmas had troops arrived.
Buried in evidence to the Coate Inquiry is an email from the now-resigned Health Secretary, Kym Peake, to the now-also-departed Premier’s Department Secretary Chris Eccles showing just how involved key officials and MPs were in this issue.
Peake’s email on the day the troops were cancelled confirms that any future request would now have to be endorsed by the heads of the departments of Premier and of Justice, as well as Health, after approval from the Premier and the relevant ministers, like Police Minister Lisa Neville.
So let’s stop the charade that the Premier knew nothing about troops back in June and had no role in overturning the decision to urgently bring them in.
The final Coate Report comes down four days before Christmas with the Premier likely hoping the departure of these bureaucrats will defuse this quarantine disgrace as Victorians rightly try to put this dreadful year behind them.
That’s why Jennifer Coate’s decision not to re-call any witnesses, especially the now resigned public servants, is such a scandal.
At the outset, she said: “I have one aim only in this inquiry, to conduct it with the forensic rigour and completeness that is expected of me and that is rightly deserved by the people of Victoria.” Unless she now asks the right questions of the right people, she will have totally failed her own test.
Originally published as Peta Credlin: More heads must roll after hotel quarantine inquiry final report
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